To test image quality we will use the recently released "HQV HD" benchmark. The entire bitstream is being decoded and post-processed over the GPU's. Amazing stuff. Then when you look at the Radeon HD 2400 XT, HD 2600 XT and GeForce 8600 GT and GTS you'll be shocked. To your right you'll notice PowerDVD decoding the H.264 content over the CPU, a 2.9 GHz Core 2 Duo X6800 I might add that's 40% CPU utilization for both CPU cores. Yes that chart looks confusing, but that's the reality and the numbers again represent CPU load on average. It's an extremely harsh title in the sense that's it's encoded with h.264 yet still was showing a decent 20 Mbit/sec this is a really hard thing to do for a any piece of hardware at 1920x1080. I ended up with the really lovely Pan's Labyrinth.
Iit took me a while to find a movie that was encoded in H.264 with a decent bitstream but hey.
Then looking at the 8600 series however, we see that they keep your CPU nicely chilled, but not as good as the UVD supported Radeon HD 24 cards from ATI. The GeForce 8800 doesn't do bitstreaming as well, yet seems to be dealing with decoding a tad better. We notice that the movie is using a VC-1 bitstream.Īs the results now show, clearly the HD 2900 XT does not have UVD. Really good performance from the 24 series, this HD bitstream is quite extensive, 25 Mbit/sec and higher was no exception. Please focus on the product that says HD2600 XT. The number you see is the average CPU utilization during the 140 seconds of decoding. Lower means better. Here we see on HD-DVD the movie title, 'The Bourne Supremacy'. Let's have a peek how well things scale with some other graphics cards included as well: The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates (e.g., half or less) than previous standards (e.g., relative to MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical (or excessively expensive) to implement.īoth HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc support both formats, yet have adopted VC-1 as a mandatory video standard. H.264 is also known as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), is a video compression standard that offers significantly greater compression than its predecessors while retaining exceptionally good image quality. VC-1 decodes HD video twice as fast as H.264, while offering two to three times better compression than MPEG-2. VC-1 minimizes the complexity of decoding high-definition content through improved intermediate stage processing and more robust transforms. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc have adopted VC-1 as a codec, meaning all video playback devices will be capable of decoding and playing video-content compressed using VC-1.
VC-1 is a video codec based on Windows Media Video Version 9.
AVC and VC1 are being seen as as the next-generation codecs. Divx, Xvid, VC1, AVC, AAC, H.264 are all MPEG 4.
MPEG Layer 4 actually has been around for a while. This is the infamous music codec that started out as under ground but evolved to a massively mainstream audience, thanks to Napster and Apple's I-pod (hey who doesn't own one right?). MPEG Layer 3 this is the most famous codec used on the planet. MPEG Layer 2 is better at compression than layer 1, but still pretty large in size compared to MPEG layer 4. Mpeg Layer 2 has no restrictions on resolution nor bitrate, which is why SONY used it on BLU-RAY for their launch titles. MPEG Layer 2 this is the most widely used video codec, It's primarily used for digital Cable and Satellite Broadcasts. A lot of old videos are encoded in Mpeg 1, some are ripped straight from VCDs. however in Asia ( China, Japan, Korea), VCD replaced VHS. VCDs never caught on in North America and Europe. MPEG Layer 1 is a video and audio format which is capped at 640x480 resolutions, MPEG layer 1 was a very early codec, and was primarily used for Video CDs (VCDs). MPEG Layer 1, MPEG Layer 2, MPEG Layer 3, MPEG Layer 4. MPEG stands for Motion Pictures Encoding Group. NVIDIA however only partly handles VC-1, we'll explain later. Both Avivo HD and PureVideo HD provide hardware acceleration for decoding the compression routines used on both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies: H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 (TS,TP). 80% of all released are being released in the VC-1 format. VC-1 is ruler of the majority of releases. Pretty much we see two major codecs for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD namely H.264 and VC-1. The data on your HD-DVD or Blu-ray disc is written on there in a specific format. To decode the content we need to learn how the content (movie) is written as data on the media (HD-DVD/Blu-Ray disc).